Stoppard: An Exceptional Playwright Who Invariably Elevated the Atmosphere of the Stage

All the great playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into clever, inventive and often emotional theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and emotion seamlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on money, marriage, morals, status, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced crazy and confined in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a